Charles Baudelaire

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.